The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have previously been conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Traditionally, when new software is purchased, the customer receives a key, or authentication code that they must input when the software is first installed. This verifies to the software service provider that the customer has a valid copy of the software installed on the machine. The key, or authentication code, may be a long string of letters or numbers that is difficult to remember and type in accurately. The software service provider must then keep track of the valid authentication codes, to help a customer if a code is lost. This may become cumbersome, particularly when there are lots of customers. Thus, a system is needed that simplifies the process from the customer's standpoint as well as the software service provider's standpoint.
Also, a customer may purchase a 1-year license for software or a hardware device, but may end up only using the software or device a few times. Thus, a more fluid system is needed that allows a customer to purchase and maintain a license for the software or device that is commensurate with the amount it is actually used. Also, the licensor needs a mechanism whereby they can monitor the actual usage of the software or device to ensure compliance with license terms.
Other information can also be conveyed with licensing systems. In the prior art, this is done manually, which can be error-prone and labor intensive. Thus, an automated system to convey information with license authorization is needed.
Data centers may be used to provide computing infrastructure by employing a number of computing resources and associated components, such as telecommunication equipment, networking equipment, storage systems, backup power supplies, environmental controls, and so forth. A data center may provide a variety of services (e.g., web applications, email services, and search engine services) for a number of customers simultaneously. To provide these services, the computing infrastructure of the data center may run various software applications and store business and operational data. The computing resources distributed throughout the data center may be physical machines and/or virtual machines running on a physical host.
Computing resources of a data center may transmit and receive data packets via one or more interconnected networks, such as a Wide Area Network (WAN). Physical switches and routers can be distributed throughout the WAN and configured to connect various network segments and route the data packets within the network environment. It may be desirable to optimize or otherwise transform the data packets transmitted and received via the WAN. Routing of the data packets for optimization may be performed by configuring physical switches, routers, and/or other network appliances, to reroute the data packets to a data optimization virtual machine. However, involving reconfiguration of physical network components in data optimization may be costly and require complex coordination of various organizations and departments.
While there are many optimization techniques that can be accomplished in a WAN, many of these optimization techniques for data transfer across a network require symmetric network components. For example, if data packets are encoded on the transmitting end before transmission through the network, they must be decoded on the receiving end. Optimization techniques may be deployed on specialized hardware devices, or operate as software on other hardware devices. A service provider of an optimization device needs a mechanism to ensure that a customer's usage of the optimization device is within the authorized license, and also to dynamically monitor and re-authorize the optimization device on an as-needed basis.